In terminal mode, there are two forms of "write", one that
explicitly mentions all data values, and a second one that
instead specifies a total range to write, where the last data
value given is replicated as needed.
This feature has been designed with the sometimes quite flakey direct
(parallel or serial port attached) bitbang programming adapters in
mind that were quite common about two decades ago.
With parallel ports vanishing from modern PCs almost completely, and
the advent of various USB-attached low-cost programming devices,
this class of programmers disappeared almost completely.
Furthermore, the fuse combinations that were covered by the feature
are no longer around on all recent AVR devices, so for an ever
increasing number of devices, safemode already became meaningless and
was turned off anyway.
With the prospective version 7.x release, it's a good point in time to
introduce a major change like this one.
* Find 'avrdude.conf' based on absolute path to executable
* Update coding style
* Update coding style
* Update 'src/doc/avrdude.texi' to reflect the new search method for 'avrdude.conf'